Constraints on phantom codes from automorphism group bounds

Executing a logical quantum circuit fault-tolerantly incurs a large spacetime overhead. Recent work has proposed and investigated phantom codes, defined by the property that every in-block logical CNOT circuit can be implemented with a physical permutation, a property that has the potential to greatly reduce the depth of compiled circuits. Here we show that phantomness comes at the cost of low encoding rate. Specifically, we prove that any binary phantom code encoding k logical qubits into n physical qubits with distance dgeq 2 obeys the bound kleq log₂(n+1) for all kneq 4. For k=4 we explicitly construct a nonstabiliser \((8, 2⁴, 2\)) phantom code that violates the bound and has a transversal non-Clifford gate. We further show that, within the class of nontrivial CSS phantom codes with kneq 4, there is a unique family of codes saturating this bound. In addition, we prove that this logarithmic ceiling cannot be circumvented by permitting additional local unitary gates, or by making use of subsystem codes: any subspace or subsystem code admitting a SWAP-transversal implementation of every logical CNOT circuit is constrained to satisfy the same bound. These bounds follow from a general theorem relating the length of a quantum code to the structure of its automorphism group, a result which may find applications beyond phantom codes.